Published: Sunday, May 11, 2014 at 09:20 AM.

For Lt. Commander Paul Rumery, an active duty chaplain at Naval Hospital Camp Lejeune, his work is a calling. “It’s a calling that one recognizes in your life to serve others,” Rumery, an American Baptist, said. “You go in it to be a helping agent for others in need ... You believe you’re called by God to serve others.”

Military chaplaincy, whether a passion, a calling or divine assignment, presents unique challenges to those serving an extremely diverse population with varied beliefs and struggles sometimes foreign to the civilian world.

For Charles Quarles, a civilian pastoral counselor at NHCL and a retired Navy chaplain who deals mainly with marriage and family issues, the biggest challenge for him serving the military is the diversity, compared to serving a congregation, which is fairly homogenous.

“I’ve pretty much always been heading in this direction, toward ministry,” said Quarles who, before serving the military, was a Southern Baptist minister in a small town in Georgia.

“In a congregation … you’re dealing with a specific group of people from a particular culture, ethnic, political, sociological background … and there are very few folks outside of that realm in that world,” Quarles said. “When you come into the military, you are dealing with people from all over the world from every conceivable economic, sociological, psychological, theological, political background you could possibly imagine, so you’re trying to provide spiritual care and comfort to a much more diverse population, so you have to be a little bit more flexible.”

Flexibility doesn’t mean changing their beliefs or thought processes, but being able to serve people of all different faiths.

“On any given day I could have a Buddhist, a Hindu, and Muslim, a Christian, an atheist, an agnostic, somebody who doesn’t know what he thinks, show up at my office in the same day,” Quarles said. “People coming in with issues that you think, ‘This is so far out of my realm of experience, it’s not even funny.’”

For Lt. Commander Paul Rumery, an active duty chaplain at Naval Hospital Camp Lejeune, his work is a calling. “It’s a calling that one recognizes in your life to serve others,” Rumery, an American Baptist, said. “You go in it to be a helping agent for others in need ... You believe you’re called by God to serve others.”

Military chaplaincy, whether a passion, a calling or divine assignment, presents unique challenges to those serving an extremely diverse population with varied beliefs and struggles sometimes foreign to the civilian world.

For Charles Quarles, a civilian pastoral counselor at NHCL and a retired Navy chaplain who deals mainly with marriage and family issues, the biggest challenge for him serving the military is the diversity, compared to serving a congregation, which is fairly homogenous.

“I’ve pretty much always been heading in this direction, toward ministry,” said Quarles who, before serving the military, was a Southern Baptist minister in a small town in Georgia.

“In a congregation … you’re dealing with a specific group of people from a particular culture, ethnic, political, sociological background … and there are very few folks outside of that realm in that world,” Quarles said. “When you come into the military, you are dealing with people from all over the world from every conceivable economic, sociological, psychological, theological, political background you could possibly imagine, so you’re trying to provide spiritual care and comfort to a much more diverse population, so you have to be a little bit more flexible.”

Flexibility doesn’t mean changing their beliefs or thought processes, but being able to serve people of all different faiths.

“On any given day I could have a Buddhist, a Hindu, and Muslim, a Christian, an atheist, an agnostic, somebody who doesn’t know what he thinks, show up at my office in the same day,” Quarles said. “People coming in with issues that you think, ‘This is so far out of my realm of experience, it’s not even funny.’”

Rumery said as an active duty chaplain, the mission is to minister.

“We facilitate for those outside of our faith group, yet we care for everybody, regardless of their background or belief system,” Rumery said. “I know there are people who do not think the way that I or (Quarles) do, but we are still their chaplains.”

Even if they do not personally minister to someone who practices a different faith, chaplains still care for them, even if that means simply getting them in contact with a local leader in their faith tradition.

They also always make resources available so service members can they practice their chosen religion; for example, the hospital chapel offers a Buddhist meditation service weekly.

One challenge for military chaplains is learning to distinguish between when a service member needs a listening ear or faith-oriented counsel.

“If they don’t bring religion into the conversation, we just listen,” Quarles said.

Often when atheists or humanists seek them out, Quarles said they are struggling with issues of guilt and shame, and the “issues of the soul.”

“It’s not so much pathology in terms of mental health, but that they just need someone to talk to,” he said.

Chaplaincy is more than religious ministerial work; it involves helping people handle their problems.

“These people, whether they’re exercising their faith or not, the whole human race has similar struggles,” Rumery said. “Stress, demands, low points in their life. They can reach out and we can offer hope, and it’s up to them to embrace the things we offer.”

Chaplaincy is also largely about availability and confidentiality.

“One thing that’s sacrosanct with chaplains, is that we have complete confidentiality,” Rumery said.

Within the bounds of military chaplaincy, law cannot dictate chaplains to divulge information about their counselees without their permission.

“This hospital has also dealt with the fallout from wounded sailors and Marines who have come back struggling with PTSD and other ailments that they just want to have a safe place to divulge, without the stigma,” Rumery said. These people can seek counsel with a chaplain without the fear of their troubles being recorded or reported.

Quarles said all chaplains have a different set of tools to serve the people for whom they are charged to care.

However, military chaplains have a unique set of challenges they see service members struggle with including demands of deployments, adjusting to the military lifestyle, a new station, or a chain of command, “the element of sacrifice and separation from loved ones,” Rumery said, which occurs on a regular basis with deployments and field exercises; relationship issues due to the many stressors military couples and families face; financial struggles, and even war zones.

As chaplains at the NHCL, both Rumery and Quarles said they also serve family members of service members, injured or sick service members and the hospital staff, making them a part of the treatment team. They not only counsel patients and their family members, they counsel staff members who are struggling with a tragedy with a patient.

On the flip side, Rumery said serving as a battalion chaplain presents its own challenges.

“As a battalion chaplain I was one to about a thousand people, and that was demanding and sometimes lonely, because you were constantly meeting crises but you were the only person to deal with the things going on,” Rumery said.

However, Quarles said a battalion chaplain sees the entire spectrum of human experience while serving their battalion: births, deaths, marriages and divorces, and everything in between, meaning they see joy as much if not more than they see tragedy.

“In the battalion, you might deal with one lost baby in the course of a year, but you’ve probably gone and visited 30 or 40 kids who have had healthy youngins,” he said.

Both chaplains have served in the armed forces in the past: Rumery as an infantry Marine and Quarles as an armor officer in the United States Army.

“We served our country and this opportunity to become a chaplain in the military … allows you to operate in this culture,” Rumery said. “This allowed us to continue to serve in the military and also our calling.”

Rumery said it also helps them relate to the people they serve.

“I know some of the struggles they’ve been through because I’ve lived those, I’ve been there myself,” he said.

But being familiar with the military can also be a hindrance in the position.

“In some cases my active duty time served me well in knowing how the organization worked,” Quarles said. “In other times my active duty background kept me from seeing things I really needed to see … I found myself at times having to fight the tendency to accept the institutional outlook because at one stage of the game I was part of the institution.”

Quarles said one of their duties as chaplains is to help the institution see things from a different angle and make changes.

Rumery, who has been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as a chaplain, said chaplains struggle with the same problems as the troops they are with in war zones.

Some of those challenges include the stress of long work days, challenging and foreign climates and environments, the mission and getting injured or seeing friends wounded or die.

“It was just constant and it was a mix of all of those put together,” he said. “And then … missing your family and friends and some of the creature comforts you’re longing for.”

That’s why Rumery said it is crucial that chaplains are also looking out for their own well-beings.

“Chaplains need to take time for self-care,” he said. “We take care of ourselves so that we can take care of others.”

Rumery said the most rewarding part of his job is realizing when he has “touched someone on an intimate level,” something he said “confirms your calling.”

Quarles said his most meaningful moments have to do with one of his “saddest yet rewarding jobs,” which is counseling families with infant deaths or fetal demise.

“Some of the most rewarding times is to go in and visit a young couple a year to 18 months later after they’ve had a loss, and they’ve had a successful birth ... I’ve been with them in both the sadness and the joy,” Quarles said.

Chaplains never know what a day might hold: one time, Quarles was called to the Emergency Department and asked to perform a wedding ceremony for a couple who were planning to get married before the groom suffered a heart attack.

“We did a wedding right there in the E.D.,” he said. “I still remember a couple of the nurses got a fake potted plant and wrapped tin foil around the base of it, so the bride is standing there holding this flower with tin foil wrapped around the inside. And strange things happen like that and you think ... this is not part of the local church’s reality, but odd things like that are very much a part of the reality of military chaplains.”